Nelson Pereira dos Santos on Who Is Beta?: and Such Other Dauntingly Brazilian Maladies

We wanted to confront Brazilian reality with our own eyes, with our own way of seeing the world, as if it were original.

—Nelson Pereira Dos Santos (1994)

Among Latin America’s cinematic traditions, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s prominence and legacy are assured.¹ For Brazil’s, he is particularly influential, assert film scholars Randal Johnson and Robert Stam: “It is difficult to overestimate the contribution of Nelson Pereira dos Santos to Brazilian cinema.”² Indeed, dos Santos’s contributions are seminal to the formation of Cinema Novo, a movement that engaged film as political praxis against neocolonialism and dependency in Brazil and more broadly Latin America. Consider that his cinematic interventions predate, as they anticipate, Cinema Novo with Rio, 40 graus / Rio, 100 Degrees (1956), an unflinching neorealist take on the black underclass in Rio de Janeiro, which Glauber Rocha was later to describe as “revolutionary in and for Brazilian cinema” and the “first really committed Brazilian film,” (See figures 9, 10, and 11)³ and Rio, zona Norte / Rio, Northern Zone (1957), a drama about the music recording industry’s appropriation of popular culture told largely in flashbacks by Espírito da Luz Soares, a samba composer from the favela (slum or ghetto).

Then, during Cinema Novo’s first phase (1960–1964), and exemplary of the most important films of this early period, dos Santos made Vidas secas / Barren Lives (1963), a haunting chronicle of an itinerant peasant family in the sertão of the Brazilian Northeast.⁴ Later, in the third and closing phase (1968–1972) of the movement, he would make Azyllo muito louco / The Alienist or A Very Crazy Asylum (1971), his first color film, an allegorical critique of a particularly repressive period during military rule in Brazil; and the highly popular and critically acclaimed Como era gostoso o meu francês / How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1972), a captivity narrative and counter-historical reading—what Robert Stam refers to as an “anthropophagic” critique—based on several sixteenth-century texts about exploration and colonization in Brazil.⁵

Figure 1.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

Image Courtesy of Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

Consider, too, that a signature and organizing feature of dos Santos’s practice, derived from the model of Italian neorealism, engaged in the Brazilian specificity. He asserts that in the mid 1960s,

the influence of neorealism was not that of a school or ideology, but rather as a production system. Neorealism taught us, in sum, that it was possible to make films in the streets; that we did not need studios; that we could film using average people rather than known actors; that the technique could be imperfect, as long as the film was truly linked to its national culture and expressed that culture.⁶

In the interview that follows, dos Santos distinguishes between “production system” and a realist approach: “I have a different way with each film, but my approach is still quite realist in the sense of what the film means and wants to say.” Such comparison foregrounds a film’s significations, not its genre or formal features, and marks dos Santos’s sustained commitment to his subject—the class and racial determinations in the Brazilian social formation, and no less important, reconstituting in the cinematic a Brazilian national identity. Here, dos Santos is unequivocal, as he so compellingly puts it in the interview: “To make a film it was necessary to put the people in the frame.” And in doing so, in the arc of his filmmaking career, dos Santos, along with other Cinema Novo filmmakers, forged a national cinema in counterpoint to Hollywood’s production scheme, conventions, and hegemony of the Latin American market. Seemingly optimistic, yet aware of much that has still to be done, in this interview he ruminates about the progress achieved and challenges ahead in the long struggle to sustain a distinctive and popular Brazilian cinema.

The occasion of the interview coincided with dos Santos’s visit to Bloomington, during...